Sunday, January 20, 2013

Steve Krug has had a huge influence
on web design through his best-selling book Don’t
Make Me Think. He asks a simple question, ‘How do we really use the web?’ We glance, scan and muddle through.
We don’t read pages, we scan them, choose the first reasonable option, and
because we’re lazy, we meander through content. This is important and, if
excesses in design are to be avoided, it has to be understood when designing web
sites and online learning.

It was a welcome brake on the
excesses of text-heavy, over designed, poorly navigable websites. His theory is
based on real practice and positive results on real web sites. Krug’s first law
of usability is to strive to make things self-evident or self-explanatory,
hence the title ‘Don’t Make Me Think’.

Design
Options

Sensitive to the needs of the
internet as a medium in itself, he emphasises the importance of the Home page.
This leads to reflection on the importance of the ‘Big Picture’, namely the essential
purpose of the site or online learning programme. He loves tag lines that
capture the essence of a site or web experience. Mission statements he hates,
as they rarely tell you the real story and usually miss the Big Picture. He
also hates badly designed rollovers, poorly designed pull down menus,
unnecessary banner ads and the over promotion of other sites. Krug hates
unnecessary noise. In online learning this can be translated into overlong
animations at the start, boring learning objectives, merely illustrative
graphics and animation, along with wallpaper video.

Structure
and navigation

Taking his lead from
newspapers, always an interesting source for screen design, he recommends
carefully designed hierarchies. He hates navigation that breaks down when you
get past the second level. The solution, he thinks, is persistent global navigation at the same position on every page
with a home button and tracking. He loves fixed menus. He also makes the useful
distinction between navigation, utilities (print, search and so on) and
content. It is always a payoff between ‘wide and deep’ hierarchies.

Be
conventional

Following on from Norman and
Nielsen, he stresses conventions. Don’t play fast and loose, make things easy
and consistent. Use conventions, such as shopping carts, standard video
controls and icons. This is sound advice. Conventions are more than just
objects of convenience, they are part of the grammar of interface design.
Designers often refuse to use conventions as they crave creativity and
innovation – this, in his view, is rarely useful. Pages should also be broken
up into carefully defined areas, clickable areas should be obvious and every
attempt made to minimise ‘noise’, again a Mayer and Clark principle in online
learning.

Half
the number of words and half again

True to his belief that
screen readers are different from readers of print, he has strong view on
writing for the screen. Less is more and so he exhorts designers and writers to
omit needless words. In his own words, “Half
the number of words and half again”. Mayer and Clark showed that this is
especially applicable to online learning as it leads to significant gains in
retention.

Usability
testing

Krug, like Norman and Nielsen
is a strong believer in usability testing. Following Nielsen and Landauer he
takes the view that a few good, experienced testers and a few iterations are
all you need. Forget the large-scale focus groups and massive testing, which
suffer from the law of diminishing returns. His practical experience shows that
just one, or a few testers early on are more effective than a large number at
the end.

He recommends evidence
gathering with a camcorder and facilitator who asks questions and gives tasks,
especially ‘Get it’ tasks where you probe the user for their understanding of
the point of the experience, how it works and how it is organised. The point of
the facilitator is to probe and ask them not only what they’re looking at but
what they’re thinking. Listen, keep an open mind and take lots of notes.

An underlying point, made
many years before by Dewey and Heidegger is that technologies work best when
they hide themselves in things and tasks. Technology is at its best when it is
invisible. This is the consistent theme in all good usability theorists and
practitioners. The task of the designer, to make the delivery mechanism as
invisible as possible.

Krug understands the
different roles of specialists in design teams and the tensions that arise
between them. His solution is to objectify the debate through testing, not with
the mythical average user, but with real users. His is a useful, practical and
prescriptive approach to good usability through good design.

Rocket
surgery made easy

His second book Rocket
Surgery made easy, shows how to do modest, low budget testin. His starting point
is that designers can’t see the bloomers as they get too close to the design
and as the navigation has come from their own heads, they lack objectivity. You
need other fingers and eyeballs but guided by experts, using voiced testimonies.

I started and ran a
successful online learning test company for many years and couldn’t agree more.
For technical testing, content testing, proof reading and functionality
testing, you may need professional services. Krug recognises this but still
recommends giving your work a good going over by some real users, under the
eagle eye of people who know what to take from their voiced evidence.

Conclusion

Krug’s prescriptions are even
more important in online learning than in web design, as learning’s great enemy
is cognitive overload and dissonance. If learners have to work hard to
understand, navigate and read online learning, they have less sustained attention
for retentive learning. Most online learning, like most offline learning, is too
long winded and needs to be seriously edited to avoid cognitive overload. Keep
navigation simple and consistent, use de
facto conventions, avoid deep hierarchies and write for the screen not the
page. And don’t forget to test – a few iterations with experts.